China's Madam Wang -- persecuted by Mao

Adam Bernstein, Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, October 19, 2006

Wang Guangmei, the former Chinese first lady who was publicly humiliated, widowed and jailed during the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong and later became known for her poverty relief efforts and charitable attitude toward Mao, died Oct. 13 at a military hospital in Beijing. She was 85.

The cause of death was variously reported as cancer and heart and kidney ailments.

Her husband, President Liu Shaoqi, was Mao's contemporary and his presumed successor as Communist Party chairman. His prominence in the late 1950s coincided with Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, an economic policy undermined by unpopular efforts to collectivize agriculture which led to widespread famine. Liu was increasingly vocal about political and economic differences with Mao.

Meanwhile, the highly educated and exquisitely dressed Madame Wang attracted the harsh jealousies of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. Their rivalry was heightened in 1963 when Madame Wang, against Jiang Qing's suggestion, wore a pearl necklace during a state visit throughout Southeast Asia.

This accouterment was considered dangerously decadent in a country where the women dressed simply. More than that, she upstaged Jiang Qing, a one-time actress.

In 1966, Mao moved to reassert his authority with the Cultural Revolution. He saw this as a way of reviving the revolutionary spirit of his party's ascension to power. It also became a way to purge his political rivals, chief among them Liu, labeled the country's "No.1 Capitalist Roader" and a "lackey of imperialism." Thousands of professionals were attacked and killed during the next few years.

With her husband under increasing pressure, Madame Wang was warned not to leave her plush official residence within the Forbidden City. She once was tricked outside by Red Guard officials who told her a daughter was injured and hospitalized, and Premier Zhou Enlai personally intervened to get her released.

Not long after, the Red Guards paraded her in front of mass audiences at Qinghua University and dressed her to resemble a "bourgeois queen" -- wearing a traditional outfit with its sides slashed to reveal her legs and, in an allusion to her fondness for pearls, an enormous necklace of table tennis balls.

In August 1967, she and her husband were marched in front of 100,000 spectators at Tiananmen Square and forced into uncomfortable positions to mock and humble them. They were then beaten in front of their young children before being separated. They would never see each other again. Liu died in 1969, presumably from medical neglect while in a prison in Kaifeng.

Their children, including a 10-year-old daughter, were persecuted and jailed. In 1972, they were allowed a rare visit to their mother in Qincheng Prison. They found her "hardly able to stand, wearing an old army coat, her face blank and sullen," Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote in his book "Heroes of My Time."

Though sentenced to death, Madame Wang was saved when Zhou persuaded Mao to have mercy, Salisbury wrote.

She spent nearly 12 years in prison before being released in 1979 -- three years after Mao's death and a year before the Communist Party Central Committee declared her family rehabilitated.

She discovered on her release that she was widowed, but she lived to see the show trials that sentenced Jiang Qing and the other members of the so-called Gang of Four, who oversaw mass purges.

Wang Guangmei was born in September 1921 in Beijing, where her father was a ranking industry official in the republican government.

She received a science degree from Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing, but after joining the Communist Party, she mostly worked as an interpreter of French and English.